February 22, 2021 10 min read Opinions expressed by You're reading Entrepreneur Middle East, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. 272 million people: as per the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Migration Report, that is the estimated number of international migrants worldwide. The report also highlights that migrants constitute a large majority of the population in most GCC countries. With such a large number of people living outside their countries of origin, and often away from their families, in search of better earnings, it begs the inevitable question- how much collective money is sent back to these nations on a yearly basis? Remittances, which are essentially financial or in-kind transfers made by migrants to family and friends back home, have been empirically proven to add monetary value to an economy. In 2019 alone, two among the top five countries money was remitted to were India (US$83.1 billion) and the Philippines ($35.2 billion), and an estimated $120 billion dollars is sent from the GCC alone to support over 150 million people across the Asian subcontinent.